I would think they would announce it at least a year before flight, so it should be announced in the coming months.

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I cheer for both NASA and commercial space. For SLS, Orion, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, Starliner, Cygnus and all the rest! I was blessed to see the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-99. The launch was beyond amazing. My 8-year old mind was blown. I remember the noise and seeing the exhaust pour out of the shuttle as it lifted off. I remember staring and watching it soar while it was visible in the clear blue sky. It was one of the greatest moments of my life and I will never forget it.

A little surprising the big brother company are having these problems after this much time on the project.

Not surprising at all. Up untill CCtCAP Boeing had mostly done sub-scale testing, software development and modeling. Now that they are getting into actually building and testing hardware, that's when the unexpected surprises start turning up.SpaceX reached the phase of "hardware-induced nasty surprises" at least 12 months before Boeing. And from the most recent public FPIP it became clear that their first manned flight slipped no less than 8 months, despite having been in the hardware phase longer than Boeing. As I indicated earlier, I fully expected both providers to have their first manned missions slip well into 2018. The recent news from Boeing is confirmation of this expectation. Given the amount of work that needs to be done in the CCtCAP phase I can only come to the conclusion that the original schedule was extremely compressed. The recent slips seem to confirm this nicely.

Wasn't this pretty much expected when the commercial crew funding was cut by Congress a couple of years ago? The original plan to fly unmanned in early 2016 with manned flights happening in late 2016 to early 2017 was said at the time to be out the window due to these funding factors over which neither Boeing nor SpaceX had any control.

It was always a matter of just how far to the right the dates were going to end up, not as to whether they would push out to late 2017 through mid 2018, right?

I for one am very surprised. All the paperwork and design reviews they did for CCiCAP went so swimmingly. All on time. Congress was very impressed.

Let me put it this way: bending metal and putting it to the test will beat paperwork and design reviews EVERY time.Even Orion can testify to that. Despite all the modeling, paperwork and design reviews the EFT-1 pressure vessel still cracked when they first started pressure-testing it. Reality beats everything else. Period.Another example: despite all the component testing and modeling and paperwork the pad-abort of Dragon 2 never reached the predicted peak altitude. It underperformed. Reality beat the predictions and it had the folks at SpaceX baffled. A source at SpaceX informed me that was one of the drivers behind delaying the in-flight abort test.

Chris Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

Saw this on Apple News. A little surprising the big brother company are having these problems after this much time on the project.

Hard to imagine that SpaceX could beat Goliath to the first manned launch. We'll know in 20-24 months, maybe.

Edit: Especially when Boeing got $1.6 billion more.

Boeing got more $$ in large part because they also needed to man rate and integrate a launch vehicle (and ground operations), while SpaceX had those in place largely for its already-finished cargo vehicle, which is the foundation of their crew vehicle. Boeing started much later, yet is still maintaining a pretty rapid development schedule and barring major delays, won't be that far behind SpaceX. And this assumes that SpaceX runs into no further troubles or delays. Besides, the race to be "first" has never been the real story except to appeal to those who just aren't excited by the real story that we are developing a multi-player, competitive private manned space industry through commercial crew program.Edit/Lar: Fixed quotes. Please, people, use the preview button and if it's not right, fix it. If it's still not right after you post, please use the modify link to fix it. It matters. Thanks....

There is, in fact, a USA flag aboard the ISS left by the last Shuttle expedition for the first US crewed vehicle to reach the ISS to claim. I know safety is way more important, but getting the flag is a desirable thing. Nothing like good ol' one upping and competition like the Founding Fathers wanted it.

No mention of the former VP of Engineering's centaur damage issue... maybe it has been resolved, or is still a shoe to drop.

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We’re working on getting it certified, and so right now, with Boeing, per the contract, we’re going through the human spaceflight organisation and looking at all the single point failures, all the redundancy, how things work, modifying the launch rockets primarily to meet their needs. It’s also interesting because the Boeing design doesn’t have an escape tower, it basically has four thrusters on the bottom of their capsule or the service module that will eject them off if there’s a bad day. And so there’s different things that the backpressure will tear apart, the backpressure of those thrusters if you have the wrong structural load will cause it to impinge on the capsule at very high altitudes, damages the heat shield, that will cause it to have a problem on reentry,

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Look, an achilles heel of the Atlas system right now is the Centaur upper stage.

Yes, actual testing of design articles can throw some surprises at you. The models can be wrong or off.

But how is it that "suddenly" there are 2 fundamental issues such as these? Have they always known such issues existed but have just now decided they won't be able to mitigate in time? Were they riding their weight margins too close for this Atlas V variant? Did they add weight because of acoustics or did the acoustics issues pop up because they added weight? Or are they unrelated? Did the mitigation design decisions of Centaur/CST/Abort thruster issues lead to increased weight and/or acoustics issues?

And the article also mentions a delay because NASA changed some software requirements. Were those changes made program wide or just for Boeing? For what and why? Vehicle diagnosis for human rating/abort?

Bill Gerstenmaier always had concerns that so much of Boeing's Actual Development & Testing were in the back-end of the schedule but that they had such superior management, processes and procedures as to help mitigate against their schedule ambitious. Now, a 6 to 8 month delay, in the grand scheme is not a huge deal. But when 2 of the most fundamental things such as weight and acoustics crop up at this stage...well, I hope this isn't something systemic. Because one day Aviation Week reports the Boeing/CST say they are on schedule and all issues are being handled. Then literally the next day we get another article about this delay. I guess we'll see.

(And remembering countless LAN parties at the office playing Quake3 Arena, I'm completely up for some Capture The Flag action to see who gets there first.)